Re: OUTAGE TRACED TO DIM BULB

[RuthWeiner@AOL.COM]

Actually, John is correct.  Transmission lines are not regulated, are owned by utilities and there is no way to mandate reliability standards, according to the Electric Reliability Council (I think that is its name), which is a private industry group.  The Reliability Council, according to its spokesman, has been trying to get standards made mandatory for many years.



And here is some food for thought for all you anti-government-regulation folks out there:  Electricity market areas are by and large fixed (except for the disastrous California experience); e.g., I HAVE to buy electricity from PNM, or generate my own.  Do the shareholders in PNM, or the PNM executives care if I am without electricity or water? Not unless they are personally affected, which they most likely aren't.  PNM wants my money, and the only control on how much they charge and what they deliver for the money is the NM Public Utilities Commission.  There is no way at all that as a private customer I could require them to maintain or upgrade reliable transmission. I have nowhere else to go for my electricity or the lines it is transmitted on, as PNM knows perfectly well. Requirements for reliability would of necessity be a government mandate.  This is why electricity was regulated in the first place -- to protect the consumer, not by some greedy power-hungry government.



I believe that we actually DO have "government by the people" and we get the government we vote for. So did the citizens and consumers who voted in the governments that gave them consumer-owned power, public utilities commissions, rural electrification, and FERC.    



Ruth







-- 

Ruth F. Weiner

ruthweiner@aol.com

505-856-5011

(o)505-284-8406

************************************************************************

You are currently subscribed to the Radsafe mailing list. To unsubscribe,

send an e-mail to Majordomo@list.vanderbilt.edu  Put the text "unsubscribe

radsafe" (no quote marks) in the body of the e-mail, with no subject line.

You can view the Radsafe archives at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/radsafe/